Sign In

Advertisement

Tag Archives: Vingt-Quatre Heures

It started with an ear. My right ear, to be exact, which the artist Alvin Booth had encased in a pale purple alginate. The material reminded me of blueberry yogurt, and out of the corner of my eye, I watched him scoop the stuff into my ear. We were in Booth’s Manhattan studio, where he lives with his wife, Nike Lanning. I was lying on an antique chaise longue, the type one sees in movies featuring French bordellos. Since my left ear was against the upholstery and my right was swathed in gelatinous goo, Booth’s words were hardly discernible, and at best he sounded like he was speaking from a distant room. I looked up and saw his mouth moving, a wild tousle of hair rising as he spoke.

For the last twenty years, Booth has been amassing a reservoir of work that revolves, capriciously, around the human body. I say capriciously because Booth doesn’t concern himself with the clinical characteristics of form, but rather with the corporeal aspect of the flesh, which is to say, the body erotic. His earlier work in photography has a nostalgic patina; through labor-intensive darkroom techniques, he produced sepia-toned gelatin-silver prints of nudes slathered in oil and gold powder, sometimes bound in latex. The close-ups are at once intimate, almost jarringly so, lending the photos a voyeuristic quality. In his digital works, geometric patterns are superimposed on the bodies of men, women, and sometimes children; his models often posed within a kaleidoscopic mirrored enclosure. The results are highly stylized compositions of natural forms, startling and disturbingly beautiful. Read More